Tip

If you administer or program websites etc., you often find yourself wondering what the specifics of a particular website or its server are. For e.g., you might want to know if a server is running on Linux, or if a site is based on Drupal or Mambo. The following sites all assist in this endeavour:

I had to reinstall W7 yesterday and after some initial setup shenanigans, I found that the best feature of Windows 7 - the Start Menu program search field - was missing. These things are usually sorted via the Customize option which can be reached by right-clicking the Start Menu. However, I could find no option for the search field. After much hemming and hawing around, I decided to retrace my steps during the initial setup that I did and wonder upon wonder, organised strategies do work!

I've previously written a short tip on how to perform batch rename operations using ls, sed, and xargs. One of the issues with xargs is that it breaks down when dealing with filenames which include spaces as it assumes that each word in the filename is a separate argument. Looking around on the Internet threw up a number of solutions mostly utilising find and xargs with the -print0 and -0 switches respectively.

If you've upgraded Drupal recently and noticed that the admin page is empty and returns a You do not have any administrative items error message, then this basically means that your menu table is a little wonky. Another tell-tale sign that you've got the same problem as I did is that the admin page will have the title, Administer rather than Administration. Fixing this is pretty straightforward, if a little painstaking. To do so, make sure that the Menu module is enabled and perform the following steps:

If you ever run into a git-receive-pack not permitted error when using Git, chances are that it's a configuration issue on your end. In my case, I had cloned the repository using via https (which required authentication). However, pushing failed with the aforementioned error. This was due to the fact that I was only allowed to push via SSH. Therefore, once I changed the protocol in the configuration for my checkout, all was well again.

Finding all the members of a group is an occasional requirement and while there are a number of ways to do this by parsing the /etc/group and /etc/password files, Debian/Ubuntu come with a simpler solution that performs all this skulduggery for you. This is the members function that can simply be installed using sudo apt-get install members . Once this is done, members of a group named foo can be listed using:
members foo.

While checking the logs of my server, I ran into the following errors:
May 11 18:00:04 named[31875]: zone example.com/IN: NS 'ns1.example.com' has no address records (A or AAAA)
May 11 18:00:04 named[31875]: zone example.com/IN: NS 'ns2.example.com' has no address records (A or AAAA)
May 11 18:00:04 named[31875]: zone example.com/IN: NS 'ns3.example.com' has no address records (A or AAAA)

Earlier today, I noticed - in htop - that a particular process, let's say 'foo-123', was running even though I had removed the package 'foo' many days earlier. I tried removing it again and found that I was right and that the package had already been removed. The package dependency list was way too long for me to go removing them one by one, or parsing them out and removing the lot.

IRC, however, was very obliging to my query and provided me with the below-pasted nifty solution that did not allow any odd gimmickry:
sudo aptitude search '~i' | grep foo

PHP provides a number of different versions for install in Windows. There are versions which are tagged with VC6 and other with VC9. There are also thread-safe and non-thread-safe versions of the installer available for download. After some digging and trial & error fiddlery, my conclusion is that VC9 and non-thread-safe are for the Microsoft IIS webserver while the VC6 and thread-safe installers are for Apache and other non-IIS webservers.

Hope this helps :)

I installed MySQL on my local server today and when I went to access it via mysql_secure_installation to set my root password etc., I ran into the following curious error:
ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)

While I initially thought that it was some kind of installation issue, after much scratching of pate, I realised that Occam was right and that I should be checking the simpler things first. Sure enough, after a quick check, I found that MySQL was not even running :/